Major search engine agency, Rosetta, recently conducted a survey of organic search engine traffic headed toward their clients’ websites. The company measured the percentage of contribution or organic clicks from Bing, Google and Yahoo and separated the information into vertical markets. The study concluded that the alliance between Bing and yahoo has created a significant competition with regards to financial services and retail against Google.
Different Results from Experian HitWise and comScore
The information was generated by over 10 million organically-referred visits between January 2011 and May 2011. This study verifies much different results presented by other search engine market data companies like Experian HitWise and comScore. Although there is always differentiation with regards to official studies due to different methods of data collection, the Rosetta findings corroborate other results and leads to untapped potential.
Explicit Core Search
The recent market share figures released by Hitwise and comScore are consistent with Google dominating at 65 percent. Both have found the combined market share for Bing and Yahoo equate to around 30 percent. These two organizations measure market share by the number of search queries found on destination sites. This is a common metric known as an explicit core search.
Search Success
Additionally, Hitwise uses the “search success” method which measures the exact number of searches that led to the click of a specific website. Hitwise found that Yahoo and Bing hold approximately 81 percent of websites that are clicked while Google searches only produce a click 66 percent of the time. This is further evidence for the rise of Yahoo and Bing.
Rosetta Study Estimations
On the other hand, the Rosetta study estimated the market share based on the perspective of a site owner by aggregating organic clicks from search engines to specific industry categories. The findings show that Google is dominant in all industries, commanding a market share of up to 75 percent in many. However, the numbers also prove that in financial services Google only holds 54 percent and in retail only 60 percent.
This indicates that the Bing-powered search through Yahoo creates a considerable SEO opportunity for those in the retail sector at almost 37 percent. These numbers are physical proof that the retail industry is becoming more prevalent with the new relationship formed between Bing and Yahoo. Therefore, it might be prudent for online retailers to invest in advertising in the Bing search engine.
2 Comments
the questions to ask is not how to do it but should we do it and if it is worth it? My answer would be to spend your energy on Google and then Bing will fall into place
Yahoo Search and Bing has also shown to be more accurate than Google.
Analytics firm Experian Hitwise Reports that Bing and Yahoo Search have the highest success rate and is therefore more accurate than Google [Tech News]